The History of the Jews

The Jewish people have taken some buffeting in their time. The Persian Empire had fallen to Alexander the Great, after which time Judea first came under the control of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Then in about 200 BCE, the Seleucids conquered that bit of the Near East from the Ptolemies. So Judea and crucially Jerusalem, where the Jewish temple called was based, was now under a Greek-speaking elite.